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Notes -
Naive policy engineering again, American electoral reform edition:
Team Red claims to want "reinforced" elections, where the risk of people casting a vote who shouldn't be able to is minimized or eliminated. A common proposed mechanism is to use state IDs to validate that the holder has the right to vote in that state or federal election, and (I imagine) to enforce one-vote-per-person. They prefer the decision to be biased in favor of minimizing false positives at the cost of increased false negatives and possibly true positives.
Team Blue opposes this with rhetoric about wanting to maximize access to the electoral systems at all levels. They prefer to maximize true positives and minimize false negatives at the cost of false positives, the symmetric opposite of Red, as in all things.
Left unstated is the assumption, seemingly held in common by both Red and Blue, that people who have a hard time obtaining state IDs are likely to vote Blue.
A compromise solution seems to exist, and I don't understand why it's not being pursued: increase funding for voting accessibility programs, in exchange for tighter requirements for voting authorization. Have, literally, a list of people who were born in state, can't be accounted for as having left the state, and authorize a spend of $10k or whatever to find them and Get Them Registered No Matter The Cost.
One thought: spending on this is a continuous value, whereas a policy state IDs as a bearer authentication token are boolean. Fine, hold state IDs out as a carrot, and offer improvements in, I don't know, signature matching in mail-in ballots.
In summary, two symmetrical problems exist, there exist opportunities to progress towards solving both of them, no serious efforts are being taken. Why? Per the meme, are they just stupid?
I think the answer is, ironically, the thing team Red always says about government overreach: giving the government the power to do something new is dangerous because even if the guy currently in office has a perfect plan to do it well and you trust him not to misuse it, the next guy could do anything he wants with it.
Giving the states the power to take away voting rights or put restrictions in front of voting is just a really dangerous thing to do, because it gives politicians a lever they can use to manipulate elections. This isn't hypothetical, we've seen it in the past with poll taxes and the like, and spent decades/centuries of vicious fighting to reform the system to prevent it.
I'm sure you could propose a system right now which, if implemented correctly, would improve the calibration of the system and get more true votes while excluding more false votes. If we imagine a benevolent philosopher-king with pure motives and perfect ability to see his will implemented, that is indeed not hard to do.
But government programs rarely see perfect implementation, what if the normal bureaucracy and stupidity gums up the works and makes is chaotic and inefficient in ways that lead to more lost votes?
What if that bureaucratic chaos preferentially affects a demographic that's aligned with one side over the other? (ie, what if poor people get screwed over because they have less power to object, which is what ussually happens for all government programs)
What if some non-benevolent actor takes advantage of that bureaucratic chaos to make things a little less efficient in the constituencies of their opponents, suppressing their vote (as we already see with things like number of voting centers, the hours they are open and whether they get shut down for weather, etc)?
What if 10 years from now you still need a voter ID, but a new politician cancels all the provisions you put in place to make them easy for everyone to get?
What if 20 years from now you still need voter ID, but a new politician decides that english should be the national language so the 20 pages of forms you need to fill out to get it will only be available in English and can only be completed in-person and you can't get an interpreter to help you?
Etc.
Basically we have lots of historical experience with governments trying to suppress the vote of their opponents and you don't want to give them any levers to do so. This isn't even a Chesterton's Fence scenario because the fence isn't mysterious, the things we're trying to prevent are well-known and in recent memory.
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